Recontextualising principles for the selection, sequencing and progression of history knowledge in four school curricula

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and compare four high school history curriculum documents with regard to how they select, sequence and make clear the progression of history knowledge. Thereafter the aim is to establish if there are any recontextualising principles that can be drawn from the comparison. The paper analyses secondary school curriculum documents from South Africa, Canada (British Columbia), Singapore and Kenya. A review of the history education literature indicates that the following concepts are productive when analysing history curriculum documents: the purpose of school history, the knowledge structure of the discipline and the distinction between substantive and procedural knowledge (or first and second order concepts) in history. These concepts thus informed a content analysis of the curriculum documents. The findings show that a memory history approach informs the Kenyan curriculum, while South Africa, Singapore and British Columbia take a disciplinary history approach. This informs the depth and breadth of the substantive knowledge that is selected, and highlights the first recontextualising principle, which is space. Curriculum designers make selections about the extent to which the history content is local, regional, national or international. The second principle is chronology, which is the key organising principle for the sequencing of content in all four curricula. The third principle relates to the conceptual progression of the substantive concepts, which is the extent to which there is progression from generic concepts, to unique, contextualised historical concepts to universal decontextualised historical concepts. The fourth principle is the extent to which the curricula choose to develop procedural knowledge in the discipline. It is not clear how disciplinary procedural knowledge finds progression in these four curricula. Research has been done on progression in historical thinking in classrooms, but this is not reflected in these curriculum documents, which do not map progression in procedural knowledge clearly.